Hollywood’s Eve
Lili Anolik Scribner €18.20 ★★★★★
The name Eve Babitz may not mean much these days, but half a century ago she swept her way through Los Angeles like a bush fire. As the writer Joan Didion noted sniffily, Babitz (pictured, right) was a kind of ‘dowager groupie’ – the groupie to whom all other groupies deferred. Her partners were so numerous that if she’d carved a notch on her bedpost for every one, it would have been reduced to splinters: Jim Morrison of The Doors, assorted Eagles, the record company boss Ahmet Ertegun, Warren Zevon... the list goes on and on.
Having grown up in a wealthy and sophisticated California family – her godfather was the composer Igor Stravinsky – Babitz decided at an early age that if ‘I could wreak any havoc in my life I would’. She started off by sleeping with artists, then moved to musicians, branching to accommodate passing actors. Here, Harrison Ford was very much the man to beat, apparently able to manage sex with nine different partners a day, as opposed to Warren Beatty’s six.
But the question is, what did Babitz actually want? The sex clearly didn’t give her much pleasure –she once wrote a book entitled Sex And Rage, and the two things were closely entwined as far as she was concerned. What she wanted most, it seems, was to be taken seriously.
Although Lili Anolik, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, does her best to portray Babitz as a neglected genius, the evidence is skimpy. ‘Inspired’ by Andy Warhol, she started painting Coke bottles – only hers were white instead of black. She designed a few album covers – most notably for The Byrds – and then in her mid-30s, when cocaine had ravaged her looks, she tried to reinvent herself as an essayist.
Babitz had some success, writing barbed profiles of people she had once hung out with. Not everyone was convinced, though; according to one critic, her work ‘demonstrated the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia’.
Meanwhile she grew increasingly cranky. Badly burned when she tried to light a cigarette while driving a car, she became a recluse, kept afloat by the generosity of former lovers such as comedian Steve Martin. Now 77, Babitz seldom ventures out of her one-room apartment. On the rare occasions she does, she still causes a stir – but not for the reasons of old. As Anolik admits, these days she tends to be a bit smelly.
In many ways this book is an ideal pairing of subject and author since Anolik proves herself every bit as self-indulgent and egotistical as Babitz, casually tossing off sentences like, ‘And so Eve’s ur-groupie stage gives way, at last, to her groupie groupie phase.’ (Having previously had to explain what she means by ‘ur-groupie’). Yet beneath hefty slabs of twaddle is the fascinating story of a woman who set out to wreak as much havoc as possible, but in the end really only succeeded in damaging herself.